Detangling

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I thanked Brian and walked a bit dazed to Lethia’s office, the range of my thoughts and emotions were erratic and I could not help but think of, the scene in the movie Tangled where Flynn takes Rapunzel out of the tower for her first time. She is ecstatically swinging from trees and rolling down hills to where she is curled up in a ball crying. Rapunzel is happy and excited to be free from bondage in one moment but filled with fear and anxiety the next, not knowing if she did the right thing or what to do with the new world around her… I quietly prayed my thanks and then thought…

 

I’m 51 years old !

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I had met with Lethia earlier in the semester to have her look over my first draft for an art history paper. She read my paper back to me and asked if I could hear where I needed to make changes, this helped a lot. And I read my papers aloud when writing them.She recommended many strategies for writing. Some of them were creative and fun like when I was having a hard time with conjunctions, she mentioned growing up with School House Rock and conjunction junction helped her…yes, I went home and watched it.

 

Lethia is a beautiful African American woman and has the kindest voice; I cannot imagine her ever yelling or getting mad, I am comfortable with her and feel safe to be myself.

Her room is homey and familiar in that she likes many of the things I like, butterflies, fairies, design and color. On one side wall, which I fortunately do not face it, is her family pictures, I love to look at pictures but if they were in front of me, I would be so distracted and want to talk about them. On her wall above her desk is the serenity prayer… I like that my mother had it hanging on the wall of the mobile home I grew up in, yes I am very comfortable with Lethia.

 

So now that my roots have been revealed, now comes the detangling, how do I use my superpowers for good? Like young Luke Skywalker, I have come to the planet Dagobah to meet with master teachers and to learn new techniques to better my skills… I was born ready to learn how to best learn to use my superpower…. Perceptual Reasoning.

 

“Perceptual Reasoning tasks require a person to examine and think about things such as designs and pictures, and to solve problems without using words. These tasks require skills in solving nonverbal problems, sometimes using eye-hand coordination, and working quickly and efficiently with visual information”

.http://whatispsychology.net/what-is-perceptual-reasoning/

 

I sat next to her at her desk we both had our iPads out – the desktop computer in front of us. She began by showing me an application called “Inspiration” a wonderful way for someone like me to mind map. It is a creative artistic concept mapping software that is fun because I see the world in pictures, and I am very hands on. It is comparable to the Minority Report touch screen Matrix thinking outside the box technology… I wrote the content for The Blonde Side and the first blog in inspiration using my iPad.

 

I can not express in words what this meant for me, It made sense that I could see how useful this was going to be along with Kurzwei, and the Livescribe recording pen and having an understanding of the academic support system in the DSS office. I was overwhelmed… I could not hold back any longer and the tears started to roll down my face.

 

The room was quiet as I apologized and asked for a tissue. I turned to Lethia and she was wide eyed and seemingly a bit surprised, she gently said, “I have never had anybody cry before”.

 

I apologized again explaining; I was having an Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller moment…

 

I turned to her saying, “It is like you just signed the word water into my hands.”

I consider teachers to be miracle workers. I am forever thankful to those whose passion fanned my spark to learn into a flame.

 

We finished up with all the technology, I hugged and thanked her excited to share the news with my three children and the one family member who always encouraged and helped me after the death of our mother, my older sister Sheryl.

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“The Roots”

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photo-17It was early spring, my first semester at CSULB and I had been questioning how do I explain my disability to people who ask.
“You don’t look disabled ?” was a common remark.
I was to meet with Brian the therapist and the coordinator for the SBP within DSS. The Stephen Benson Program is geared toward students with a learning and/or print processing disability. Students that are accepted into the program can receive academic counseling, testing for a learning disability, extended time on classroom exams, and introduction to assistive technology.
He was going to help me understand my individual ability/achievement profile scores.
I had two back to back appointments that day and when I first arrived I went straight to Lethia’s office, the writing specialist. She was to introduce and demonstrate technology to assist me in my education…
Sounded cool and I was excited to learn.
I wasn’t in her office but a minute when Brian popped in smiling and asking if she had stolen his client’s appointment time. I immediately felt anxious, which was not unusual, thinking to myself… not again.
I checked my calendar and sure as the sun shines, somewhere in the process of writing the date and time, along with my brain’s intake and storing the info process, I had reversed the appointments... I did remember to show up !
I followed him and tried to hide my discomfort behind a smile and a laugh, just another blonde moment I found myself saying aloud.

 

In his office I quickly scanned the room as I do every environment I am in, particularly with anything and anyone novel. He had picture frames with no pictures but cut out comic strips that were taped to the glass. He had one Philodendron plant, you know the type that is hard to kill and grows long vines. His office was a fairly neat and organized work space with photos of his children, the walls were plain…good…not to many distractions.
Brian has one of those smiles that is contagious, he is white with ice blue eyes,
a pleasant round face with dimpled cheeks.
He laughs easily and I liked him immediately but he had yet to be a person I felt safe with; nothing personal other then It was our first meeting.
I sat at a table across from him.
He had taken all my testing information and put it into a program he had developed, it was a three color bar graph, horizontal lines of pink yellow and green along with four small pictures representing the four area that I had extensive testing in, reading, math, writing and ability…picture a brain.
The first was a pink column, it represented below average.
The yellow wider of the three and middle column was the average and next
was the green column representing the above average.
The range of the graph measured from 0% to100%
I stared down at the paper, my eyes heavy with emotion, I held back tears… Snapshots of moments in time throughout my life flooded my thoughts as he spoke… using words like dyscalculia, dyslexia, ADHD. It all made perfect sense in reviewing the many struggles I have had.
Then a word I never expected to hear…gifted.
I could see the vertical blue bars of my math scores all in the pink…below average.
Reading vocabulary, comprehension and spelling also in pink.
There was my yellow high and low averages.
Then there was two bars in the green, one was writing fluency, the other…
perceptual reasoning… my superpower.
Simply stated, I have ADHD and a learning disability that affects math along with processing decrease deficits in working memory and processing speed that impact my reading comprehension.
At that moment of discovery, I was awakened to the start of an new adventure
concerning what to do with this information and how to understand and use
my two superpowers wisely. When the roots of a problem are identified and understood the more likely a remedy can be found.
Lethia’s office was next and an even bigger surprise awaited.